


Unveiling the Goddess

by maracolleenbanks



Category: Dreamwalkers Universe
Genre: F/M, Gods, Ouroboros (Dreamwalkers), Venus (Dreamwalkers)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 09:32:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15361506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maracolleenbanks/pseuds/maracolleenbanks





	Unveiling the Goddess

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dreamwalkers Universe](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/404349) by Siren Tycho and Mara Colleen Banks. 



The sun hadn’t yet disappeared over the green hills on the far side of the river, but the light was changing, turning everything into shadows and giving the grass a bluish tinge everywhere except the place where the sun seemed to almost touch the ground where all detail was blown away. Standing on the rise of the river bank, she could almost believe the sun was eye-level. 

Freyr was out there, on the other side of the sun. She had been gone all day, but he didn’t know that yet. Time ran differently on the planets than on the ring world, and she hadn’t been gone long enough from his perspective for him to miss her yet. She understood the reason for it. The ability to be on one of the planets for a million years without time passing on the ring gave those without branching consciousness the opportunity to experience, in a small way, what it was like to be divine, pursuing a passion as deep as they wanted to go without spending less time with loved ones, but she was divine, and knowing that she was missing people who didn’t miss her made her feel especially lonely. 

She had been made to be seen. From the first moment of her existence until now, she had had eyes on her. Her maker, Poseidon, always had a branch of his consciousness watching her. He was watching another of her branches now as she celebrated the sun moving into Sagittarius by sitting on the floor in front of the fire in the little house in his pocket universe sorting through her Sagittarius box, the collection of journals and keepsakes and photos she collected each year while the sun was in Sagittarius. She could turn her attention to that branch and feel his eyes on her in the little house without reeling the branch she had on Venus back in. From her perspective, that branch was frozen in time, considering a picture she’d taken of Poseidon scrambling eggs, and it comforted her some, but this was still far too much privacy. 

Since she had graduated from school, and she and Freyr had started their own Venus, and she had come into the public eye on her own, there were usually many more eyes. There would have been, even on that relatively obscure river bank, if she put on her public form, but visiting her planet in all her goddess glory was exactly not the point. 

She turned away from the sun, abandoning the view, and began to turn her attention to what she had come to Venus to do.

The bathing house was already almost dark by the time she reached it. Most who were going to eat their evening meal in community had already cleansed themselves, so there was no waiting for the place at the fountain near the door that was still in the light. She cupped her hands under a spout that flowed river water continually into a long marble sink at solar plexus level and splashed her face. Then she dipped one foot at a time into the stream that flowed under the sink to wash them.

It had been a hot day for winter. Though only washing hands, feet, and face was traditional before meals, she dunked her head under the fountain, letting her long, black hair flow freely down stream until her head was thoroughly soaked. Then, in one quick motion, she flipped it all behind her head, showering the room with water. 

Her cleanse complete, she clapped twice to thank the river for taking her sweat and dirt away and pinned her wet hair into a loose bun that would curl her hair as it dried. Last of all, she pinned a veil of black lace into her hair, careful to allow it to drape over her forehead and partly cover the back of her neck, so it could be seen from all angles, warning all who would talk to her that she wasn’t interested in conversation.

Most would have thought this request for solitude came from a desire to center herself before ritual, but those who were at all close to her knew she had been quietly avoiding everyone for weeks. 

“Suddenly moody,” she heard one of her priestesses say a few days before when the priestess didn’t know her goddess was nearby.

Outside the bathing house, the last of the sun’s disc was disappearing over the horizon. She bowed to the sun and bid the star goodnight. Her people were not sun worshippers, but she had made it a personal ritual to greet the sun at sunset and sunrise whenever she was in a place with sunsets. It was a small thing to thank the sun for making Freyr. 

The evening meal was nearly over when she arrived at the dining pavilion, but she had never gotten the hang of regular mealtimes and so arranged that there would always be plenty of food around for those who grew hungry at any time of day or night. The offering was light because of the heat: shaved meat and chopped vegetables with a tangy-spicy white sauce on flatbread. She took a modest plate, not wanting to be too full to move during ritual. Then she sat at a table far from lingering diners. 

Despite the veil on her head, clearly broadcasting her desire for silence, she was joined moments later by Gorg. Gorg was tall and muscular with skin the rich dark color of wild cherry bark. Around his neck was a heavy gold chain with a medallion at chest level bearing Freyr's sign, marking him as one of Freyr’s priests. He was only supposed to wear his markers of office when he was actually serving in an official function, but, since he was supposed to perform the evening rite and dinner was in the evening, she supposed he decided it was close enough. 

Anyone else who ignored her veil and joined her for dinner that night would have gotten a thorough scolding, but since she and Gorg were to serve together at ritual, she felt she owed him a conversation. This was the only reason she didn’t order him away, especially after he skipped the traditional greeting of priests and priestesses and attacked his food without acknowledging her or even stopping to think about what was on his plate.

She glowered but said nothing, and he raised an eyebrow at her. 

“Freya,” he said quietly.

Her eyes darted around the room until she was assured that no one had heard him. 

It was edgy for a goddess to visit her own world in incarnate form, and she was only, barely, able to justify it by hiding her identity. The gods kept their distance from individual humans on Ouroboros, except in the context of working relationships. Personal relationships between gods and humans ran the risk of creating partiality. No one wanted the god who was dreaming up the ground they were standing on to be partial in any way. She and Freyr justified her visits to Venus as working visits. They were working visits, even if they involved sex. She couldn’t trust that one of her priestesses would be able to do the ritual she would do with Gorg that night.

“I’m not going to greet you like you’re a priestess if you’re not one,” Gorg said, “and you don’t stop being a goddess just because I don’t bow.”

He was too careful to say something that might reveal her identity to anyone who didn’t already know, but she instinctively looked around again.

“Relax,” he said. “You’ve been doing this for decades.”

“Centuries,” she said. “You can’t possibly expect me to be used to this yet.”

He stopped chewing mid-bite. Unless something disastrous happened, all humans on Ouroboros were immortal, and that gave them, generally, a lackadaisical attitude toward time. Adolescence could stretch on for centuries if you wanted it to, and the gods took an even longer view of time than this. He had accepted easily the idea that the priestess in front of him actually was the goddess she claimed to represent, but this information must have made that fact seem more real. It took him a minute or two to return to chewing, and she allowed him to sit in silence digesting this newly understood fact. 

Now that her food was in front of her, she found she wasn’t hungry, and she took to rearranging her lettuce, hoping the smell of grease and garlic that dripped down from the meat would tempt her to eat.

Gorg glanced out the pavilion at the darkening sky, got up with his now empty plate, and left the table with a nod to her. This wasn’t the note she wanted to go to ritual on. She was tempted to jump up and stop him and try to make things better. The ritual would wait for them if they were late, but it would have been undignified for her to run after one of her partner’s priests, and she knew Gorg. By the time she found her way to the temple, he would have already had himself—and everyone else in the room—in an entirely different frame of mind.

 

For this ritual, it was traditional for the priestess to arrive after the priest had a chance to get everyone in the proper frame. It was easier for the priest to do his work without having the priestess watching, but she couldn’t help hiding in the back to watch Gorg work.

Order wasn’t exactly one of Freyr’s purviews, but there was a way this ritual was supposed to go. Like the greeting protocol, however, Gorg had his own ideas. Instead of choosing one of the twenty-two approved lessons with their known and codified call and response, Gorg improvised. She should have been furious, but Gorg always did this, and watching him was magical. Instead of losing everyone in the unfamiliar form of the rite like one would expect from a ritual that was usually so well known and defined, he managed to bring the crowd into his rhythm, a conversation punctuated by the drummers who improvised along with him, following his stomping feet and jocular thrusts.

An outsider who didn’t know the language would have thought that he was getting the crowd in the mood for an orgy, but she and Gorg were the only ones who would be having sex during the ritual. The ritual was, at the core, an educational exercise, and Gorg was technically lecturing. The subject was good thrusting technique and the importance of it, even in positions where getting the right angle was difficult, for the receiving partner.

When the lecture was over, he stepped back to make room on the stage for her undulating—and more subdued—dance, the pent-up energy and nervousness that always marked the beginning of that ritual began to dissolve into calm sensuality. 

She danced through the crowd slowly, and those in her path moved aside for her like a river flowing around a hand lazily pulling the tips of its fingers through the water. Gorg watched with a flat expression that hid his thoughts, arms folded in front of him, yet she felt his eyes on her ass as she reached the stage and sank to her knees, rolling her belly and hips in time to the rhythm of the drums. 

She’d done this dance hundreds of times before, but she’d never flowed with the music like this. The purpose of these rituals was so practical, helping people find healing through good sex, but she felt like she was making art with her body. When she finally felt his hands on her hips—this, at least, was how this ritual was supposed to be done—she let go and fell back onto him in heart as well as body, losing herself in the feeling of his hips meeting her ass and holding her as his cock slid into her, massaging perfectly the tender, sensitive place he had been lecturing about. 

Even with all the dignity of a goddess, there was no hiding how good that felt, but she let herself fall deeper into the pleasure than others in a public setting would have dared, using her divine ability to focus to utterly ignore the crowd and focus on their bodies. What was he saying fucking her that way? She listened with her body and did her best to translate it into words. 

I see you, she heard him say. Though everyone else here thinks you’re someone else, I know who you are. I see you and know you and fuck you as my goddess. 

Tears pooled in her eyes as the loneliness she had been harboring all day welled up to be released, and she allowed the tears to fall without sweeping them away. This was the part of the ritual she couldn’t trust her priestesses for, the part she had to do herself. She couldn’t ask a person to be vulnerable like this. Even if they were willing, the mere fact of being in the position of doing it on demand would have necessarily taken the raw edge off of it. It would have, in action, negated the message of Gorg’s lecture. The people in the audience had to see the difference it made for her. They had to watch him pick her cunt like a lock, opening a door to that deep vault of emotion, releasing the grief she’d been harboring there. They had to see how their coming together made the pain flow and pass out of her and away in the liquid pleasure that flowed around his cock and down his thighs.

She felt as if the ordinary humanity of incarnate existence was something she could just put aside. She flowed with the rhythm of their dance like a river glistening and glittering hot under the piercing gaze of the sun.

Then the room went white.

When she could see again, someone was pulling her off the floor by the elbow, and Gorg sat on the floor as if he’d been blown back. He gaped up at her and said nothing. In a moment, she was encircled by priestesses, and the hand on her arm dragged her to the bathing house. 

When they arrived, she was pushed over the sink to look in the water. In her rippling reflection, she saw her face was glowing.

 

Her public face was supposed to be something she could put on and off at whim, but she and her priestesses waited for what seemed like hours as she tried and failed to make it stop. Finally, she sent someone to her room to retrieve a thicker veil and wrapped her head in it.

When she stepped out of the bath house and into the night, Gorg was waiting for her.

“You look tired,” he said, and she gave him a weak smile. “Does this mean you’re flowing on?”

“I have to,” she said. “I can’t risk something like this happening again.”

“Do you?” he asked. “You’ve been doing this for centuries, you said, and nothing like this has ever happened before. If it has, I’ve never heard of it. Give it a week or two, and it will be forgotten. I’m sure it’ll never happen again.”

She shook her head. “I’m telling myself something if I can’t change back. I just don’t know what it is yet. I have to pass the torch to one of my priestesses.”

“It won’t be the same,” he said. 

He was trying to get her to change her mind, but those last words did nothing but argue the opposite. She had been playing priestess for too long. He was starting to see her as one, as human. Worse, he was starting to get attached. She liked Gorg, and she knew that she wouldn’t be able to create an appropriate distance between them if she stayed.

She took his hand and squeezed it then closed her eyes, turning her attention toward her branch in the little house, withdrawing her senses from Venus until her body there began to flow and merge with her body in the little house. 

Time in the little house began to flow again. She looked up at the place where her Poseidon’s attention hovered incorporeal. Tears formed in her eyes, and he was there in a moment, stepping seemingly from nowhere onto the rug by the fire, kneeling behind her, sweeping her up into a hug. He didn’t ask what was wrong, but she felt him paging through her, reading her memories of what had happened. When he reached the end, he hugged her tighter and kissed her neck. 

“Odin and I went through something similar, you know,” he said.

“You did?” she asked. 

It was hard for her to imagine those two great, distant gods allowing a human they worked with to get close to them like that. No one but the gods even knew what they really looked like. They each had old man aspects that they used when they needed to show a face, so different from the faces she knew, a far more convincing disguise than the glowing mask she wore over her own features. She reminded herself that Odin and Poseidon had been young once, too, before they left the Venus that was their first world and became the sea and sky for all of Ouroboros. 

“We did,” Poseidon said, “more than once.”

“You mean repeatedly,” Odin said, materializing on the couch behind them, glass of ale in hand. 

“Constantly,” Poseidon said. “It’s hard, nearly impossible to work with humans without forming relationships with them, especially on a place like Venus.”

“Nobody expects you to be vulnerable on Mars,” Odin said.

“I think it’s brave what you did,” Poseidon said.

“More like failed to do,” she said. 

“Failed to do forever,” Odin corrected. “Everyone fails to do everything forever, and who cares? Doing the same thing forever would be boring. It was about time you handed it off, if you ask me.”

“Do you think that’s why I couldn’t get my face to stop glowing?” she asked.

“I’m almost certain of it,” Poseidon said. “You can only go on so long pretending to be someone you’re not. What can I say? You were made to shine.”


End file.
